Theorizing that one could time travel within his own lifetime, Doctor Sam Beckett led an elite group of scientists into the desert to develop a top secret project known as "Quantum Leap."

Pressured to prove his theories or lose funding, Dr. Beckett prematurely stepped into the Project Accelerator, and vanished......
He awoke to find himself trapped in the past, suffering from partial amnesia and facing a mirror image that was not his own.

Fortunately, contact with his own time was maintained through brain wave transmissions with Al, the Project Observer who appeared in the form of a hologram that only Dr. Beckett can see and hear.

Trapped in the past, Dr. Beckett finds himself leaping from life to life, putting things right that once went wrong, and hoping each time that his next leap will be the leap home..........

You know, maybe this quantum leaping isn't such a bad deal after all. Getting a chance to put things right, to make the world a better place - who knows what I can accomplish before I'm done.
-- Sam Beckett, "Genesis"

The Urban Dictionary Mug

A physics term describing the movement of an electron withing an atom from one energy state to another without passing through any intermediate levels. It was adopted into popularslang to refer to a sudden advance (especially in science or technology) that seems much more rapid than the normal evolution in that field. The term may also denote sudden, positive social shifts.

Leslie Iwerks produced the first synchronized-sound cartoon, "Steamboat Willie," which represented a quantum leap forward in animation technology.

The Gutenberg press, an invention featuring moveable type, represented a quantum leap forward for people in the 15th century.

Email represented a quantum leap forward in productivity in the 1990s.

The Urban Dictionary Mug

When you find yourself in the middle of a situation where you have no idea what is going on, but everyone else around you assumes you do.

The term is a reference to the TV show where the lead character is trapped in time and travels therein by leaping into the body of someone in the past, but having no idea who he is or why he is there. In order to leave the body, the lead character must figure out what "situation/conflict" must be resolved or wrong must be righted by the host body. The people around him assume he is the person whose body he occupies, so anything he does, the people around him think it is the host body doing it.

"I just quantum leaped into a phone conversation with Karen. She started talking to me about something that she thought I already knew, but I had no idea what she was talking about."